MASTERS OF DEATH - RICHARD RHODES

Dark stuff. This book covers the history of Holocaust and, specifically, the role of the the Einsatzgruppen, the SS units that did most of the massacring and killing. The popular depictions of the Holocaust focus on the shower/gas chambers probably because it’s such an extreme and gruesome image, one that’s pretty unusual in human history, however, the vast majority of the ~20 million unarmed deaths perpetrated by the Nazis (6 million Jews, 3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens, 3 million Soviet POWs) were shot by these mobile groups that went from town to town behind the Wehrmacht to clear the area for German colonialism. As you can imagine, this book is quite grim. Lots of first-hand accounts of entire towns being marched or trucked out of town into a forest and shot, one after another, and thrown into a pit. A surprising (to me at least) number of people didn’t die from the shots, played dead for a few hours while their neighbors and loved ones were killed and stacked on top of them, then climbed out of a pile of the dead and dying and ran to safety. Their accounts are in this book and they’re beyond one’s ability to really think about. Two me there were two really interesting issue this book brought up. The first has to do with what the Nazis thought they were doing. At first the story is that they’re killing partisans and resistance fighters, people who would kill German troops if given a chance making their liquidations a matter of self-protection. However, when they move on to women and children and non-military aged men, this reasoning stops really making sense, to either the leadership or the soldiers themselves. The leadership (we’ll get back to the soldiers) starts to reach for the language of colonialism to explain what they’re doing. Himmler says that once they clear out Eastern Europe, they’ll be able to populate the area with Wehrbauer, their term for soldier/farmer/settlers. They specifically invoke a number of Western European and American projects. Hitler says, “The Russian space is our India. Like the English we shall rule this empire with a handful of men,” and, at another time, “There is one duty: to Germanize this country by immigration and to look upon the natives [of Eastern Europe and Russia] as Redskins…I don’t see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produced this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indian.” So basically he was trying to shove into a few short years the amount of genocide that took the classical Imperial powers, France, USA, Britain, a number of decades to accomplish. It’s also interesting to me that they were constantly attempting to keep these actions a secret as possible. They punished SS men who took pictures (sometimes as documents of the horrors but more often for sadistic personal reasons) and occasionally attempted to move graves and exhume and burn bodies so opposing armies wouldn’t find them. One thinks about the world in which they won and talking about the Nazi holocaust gets you the looks you get when you talk about the US’s actions as genocide (try comparing the Texas Rangers to the Einstazgruppen, a pretty one-to-one comparison, and see how people react). The second interesting issue the book raised had to do with how Nazi leadership dealt with the soldiers tasked with carrying these actions out. On the one hand, you need men to actually pull the trigger and kill hundreds of defenseless and crying men/women/children everyday for days on end without “becoming weak and cracking up” (Himmler’s words) but they also didn’t want them to enjoy it too much and become sadistic psychos who tarnish the reputation of the German army.Himmler himself described it as a Scylla and Charybdis situation. At first they attempt to have locals in the towns they conquer do the killings themselves. The Banderists and the Order of Ukrainian Nationalists, both of whom have become very famous recently with all the current war in Ukraine, were eager to massacre Jews but the rest of the region wasn’t getting the job done quick enough. This actually makes me think of later US massacres, like El Mozote, or Dasht-i-Leili or some of the Phoenix stuff, where the US planned, ordered and oversaw “locals” doing the killing to retain some level of deniability. But back to the Nazis, they set up hospitals and programs for SS men who suffer nervous breakdowns due to their role in the killings. They instruct officers to make sure to have big group dinners afterwards, in the “German style,” with alcohol and music, to help these men compartmentalize what they did and allow them to keep on killing. However, the book also has a brief part at the end about a unit called Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, made up of criminals from German prisons and headed by an alcoholic, pedophillic veteran tasked with the most gruesome rape-and-pillage style actions imaginable so perhaps they weren’t always so concerned about optics. Overall, while to book is dark as it gets, it does connect up to the present. As more and more of our wars rely on these specialized units, who we often call “Death Squads” when they’re not on our side and “Special Forces” when they are, who are often engaged in “work” that is both secretive and unsavory (looking at you Seal Team 6), is probably good to look back to see where this sort of technique was refined for the 20th century. The Enstazgruppen legacy is certainly alive and well. 1939 Special Units